Werewords

[sunrise089]

I’d just cut the number of questions available down. As a lurker it was entertaining but there wasn’t much discussion and it didn’t seem like there needed to be since there were plenty of question slots to go around.

[BRickAstley]

Yeah, I feel like it was a mixed success. I enjoyed setting it up and watching the progression from my standpoint, but it does seem rough around the edges.

I would be game to run another game, but I'd like to make a few tweaks to the setup. I just don't know what those would be yet.

Or we can just stick to regular WW and codenames.

[T-hawk]

I'll chime in because I've played the game in real life.  What stops the questions of "should we avoid the word on purpose" is that you don't really have time to think through that stuff with a hard 3 or 5 minute real-time limit.  You also don't remember and refer back to the entire history of questions, to be able to pick out a seer who seemingly had a stroke of genius out of nowhere, or to pick out a wolf wasting questions or just being quiet. The limited number of answers doesn't really come into play (the time limit happens first), so it's not really a thing for someone to try to burn all the guesses.

The game kinda relies on the imperfect nature of communication in a rushed real-time environment.  It's a party game more than a deduction game, and relies on going with the spirit rather than exhaustively picking apart every word.  That all said, all props to Brick for trying it out on a forum (and more rounds are certainly possible if people want), it was certainly a cool experience both to play and to lurk.

[scooter]

I'll chime in because I've played the game in real life.  What stops the questions of "should we avoid the word on purpose" is that you don't really have time to think through that stuff with a hard 3 or 5 minute real-time limit.  You also don't remember and refer back to the entire history of questions, to be able to pick out a seer who seemingly had a stroke of genius out of nowhere, or to pick out a wolf wasting questions or just being quiet.  The game kinda relies on the imperfect nature of communication in a rushed real-time environment.  It's a party game more than a deduction game, and relies on going with the spirit rather than exhaustively picking apart every word.  That all said, all props to Brick for trying it out on a forum (and more rounds are certainly possible if people want), it was certainly a cool experience both to play and to lurk.

Yeah this makes sense to me. I wonder if this is the kind of game that just has to happen in a discord chat session or something rather than the forum. Feels like the real-time nature is just kind of essential.

[T-hawk]

Here's the problem with the win conditions: The perverse incentive is that winning the word fight makes your team forfeit access to a win condition, only the opposing team gets to role-guess for the win.

Here's one way to fix that.  Always do both endgame role guesses, both the town hunting a wolf and the wolves hunting a seer. The right procedure to keep it double-blind would be for the wolves to lock in a seer guess secretly to the GM, then have the town vote on finding a wolf.

- Town wins if they guess the word AND correctly find a wolf, regardless of the wolves hitting the seer.
- Wolves win if the guessing fails AND they find the seer, regardless of the town hitting a wolf.
- Otherwise standard win conditions.

I think that fixes the perverse incentive: the winner of the word fight gets to have their role guess take precedence over the opposing role guess, instead of losing the opportunity to make it.

[NobleHelium]

Well that just means the endgame is the win condition except the main phase acts as tiebreaker, no?

[T-hawk]

Exactly, which is better than the main phase potentially acting as a lose condition.

[Kaiser]

GG guys, it was fun searching for the word even though I realized that it has some difficulties for non-natives. The ruse to seem maybe a bit to obvious did not work apparently.

@NobleHelium
Thanks for the clarification